Trapped in Dubai
She flew there to turn 30. Her government started a war and told her to figure it out.
She has been in Dubai since February 24th. Three flights booked. Three cancellations. She is crying on TikTok, speaking directly into the camera the way people speak when they have run out of other options.
I am an American taxpayer and citizen and I am stuck here.
The comment section becomes what her government would not: a flight attendant tells her to drive to Oman. Someone posts a flight tracking link. Someone else has found Ethiopian Airlines still running out of Muscat. A comment thread on another site asks the same question she is asking, I’m stuck in Dubai. What’s the best way out?, and one answer rises above everything else, plain as a verdict: The US has told its citizens in the area not to expect any help getting home.
On February 28th, the United States and Israel launched Operation Epic Fury. The strike killed Iran’s Supreme Leader. Iran answered the same day.
By nightfall, the Burj Al Arab was on fire, a drone hitting the base of the sail-shaped tower the city had spent decades making synonymous with safety. The Fairmont Palm was struck. Jebel Ali Port, the largest in the Middle East, was burning. Dubai International Airport, the world’s busiest for international traffic, took a direct hit to Terminal 3. Four airport staff injured. Passengers evacuating through dust. The US Consulate was struck. 23 Marina Tower was struck. A residential building near Palm Jumeirah caught fire and did not stop for hours.
Puffs of white smoke from intercepted missiles dotted the sky above the city. Below them, black smoke from the ones that got through.
Twenty-one thousand three hundred flights cancelled across seven major airports. Dubai International lost 70 percent of its departures in a single day. The airspace the United States shattered was the same airspace Americans needed to get home.
At a labor camp in Abu Dhabi, Gagandeep, 24, a construction worker from Jalandhar, watched missiles pass overhead. He had been told to stay inside. There were 2,000 to 4,000 Indians at his camp alone. The neighboring camp had been hit. He said it was scarier at night.
She was in a hotel. He was in a camp. The same sky above both of them.
The arrangement does not ask permission. It just comes due.
Three people died on the ground. A Pakistani national. A Nepali national. A Bangladeshi national. Workers, not tourists. Their names have not been released.
Then the government spoke.
Trump: It happened all very quickly. Rubio said evacuations would take time because we do not control the airspace closures. The United States does not control the airspace it shattered.
The UK flew charters. Australia flew charters. Bulgaria flew charters. The European Commission coordinated repatriation for its citizens. Americans got a hotline. The hotline did not answer.
She got better evacuation intelligence from a flight attendant in a TikTok comment than from the government that started the fire. She invoked the civic contract, I am a taxpayer, I am a citizen, see me, and her government said: it happened quickly.
It did not happen quickly. It was a choice. She was not part of the calculation.
The Handshake
In June 1974, Richard Nixon landed in Jeddah with 500 aides and 20 aircraft, the first American president ever to set foot in Saudi Arabia, arriving months after King Faisal had led the oil embargo that had Americans waiting in lines around the block for gasoline. They shook hands for cameras. They spoke of unbroken friendship. Behind them, Kissinger and Prince Fahd grinned. The deals formalized that week: Saudi Arabia would buy American weapons, invest billions in American financial markets, keep oil prices stable. The United States would provide military expertise, sell advanced arms, protect the kingdom from its enemies.
Both sides were careful never to call it an alliance. Formal alliances require Senate ratification. What they built instead was an arrangement. And the arrangement spread across the Gulf.
Al Dhafra Air Base sits inside UAE territory. B-2 bombers. F-35s. Launch platforms for American military operations across the region for decades. The UAE did not merely tolerate the American presence. It invited it in. That invitation was the security guarantee underwriting the investment climate underwriting the towers.
August 13, 2020: the Abraham Accords. The UAE became the first Gulf state to formally normalize relations with Israel, brokered by Trump, signed on the White House lawn. The price was a $23 billion American arms sale, F-35s and drones. Not peace. A security realignment against Iran, dressed in the language of tolerance. Dubai opened kosher restaurants in the Burj Khalifa. Israeli tourists flew direct. The UAE called it a new Middle East.
The arrangement always had a cost. The question was only when it came due, and who was standing closest.
Gold and Sonapur
ATMs dispensing gold bars in hotel lobbies, the price updating every ten minutes. An indoor ski slope inside a mall while the temperature outside reached 50 degrees Celsius. A police fleet of Bugatti Veyrons and Lamborghini Aventadors deployed not to enforce law but to show tourists how friendly the force is. A single license plate, just the number “1,” sold at auction for $7.25 million, ten times the price of the car it was bolted to.
In 2024, Dubai led the entire world in $10 million-plus residential sales, 435 transactions, more than London, New York, and Hong Kong combined. A Bugatti-branded penthouse sold for the equivalent of $150 million in December 2025, while Iranian drones were already beginning to arc toward the coast. During the war’s second week, Dubai recorded a $115 million apartment sale, its third-highest ever. Analysts described the market as showing resilience and sustained investor demand.
The top 1 percent hold more than half the country’s total wealth. The bottom 50 percent take home 5.8 percent of national income.
And underneath all of it, the towers, the penthouses, the gold ATMs, the Bugatti police cars, the people who built it.
Construction workers earning $150 to $200 a month. Six-day weeks. Eleven-hour days in heat that kills. Employers seized passports on arrival, illegal, routine. Wages withheld for months, also illegal, also routine. Workers housed in Sonapur, the world’s largest labor camp: overflowing toilets, no air conditioning, bodies packed into rooms at the edge of the desert far from the skyline they built. More than 700 workplace deaths per year. Ninety suicides annually.
On Fridays, the one day off, thousands gather under highway bridges. Not parks. Not cafes. Under bridges. There is nowhere else to go.
Babik, an Indian national working the Expo 2020 pavilions, told human rights researchers: “The way they treat the staff is like slaves. I mean, modern-day slavery.”
A Pakistani construction worker spent months trying to retrieve his passport so he could go home after floods destroyed his family’s house. He told his employer his son had died. The lie worked. “Everything that glitters,” he said, “is not gold.”
Workers from Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal, India, the same nationalities now dying unnamed in the rubble, built every tower Western tourists photographed and staffed every hotel Western tourists slept in. Their families never saw the city and never would.
Dubai was where Western Islamophobia suspended itself for the weekend. Muslim wealth arranged in service of Western comfort. Islam as aesthetic rather than identity. The Middle East with the politics removed.
It was never removed. It was deferred.
This is what American investors want for Gaza. This is what they want for Iran.
The Unnamed
A territory that internalizes empire’s logic, that makes itself hospitable to empire’s capital, signs the normalization agreements on White House lawns, invites the military inside its borders and calls it partnership, does not escape the violence that structures empire. It launders it. Laundered violence finds the launderer.
You cannot be inside the arrangement and outside its consequences. The UAE chose the alliance. It did not choose the war. But the war came anyway, because America chose it, and the arrangement does not come with the right to say no when the bill arrives.
The celebrities posted: we are safe. One said she came to Dubai to feel safe and now this had happened to her. Others mocked the people worried about the strikes, you could never afford to go anyway, they said, as if the price of a ticket determined whether the drones were real. The city as product. The war as personal inconvenience.
The three dead, Pakistani, Nepali, Bangladeshi, came for the same promise. Built the towers. Staffed the hotels. Sent money home. Died in a war their countries did not start, in a city they were never fully allowed to inhabit, for an arrangement they were never invited to negotiate.
Nobody asked if their families were okay.
Their names have not been released.
Nobody Asked
Dubai sold that belief harder than any city on earth. It sold it in gold and marble and Bugatti police cars and penthouses closing escrow while drones tracked inbound.
It sold it until the drones arrived.
The arrangement was built over decades. Every arms deal since Kissinger and Fahd grinned on a tarmac in Jeddah. Every base invited in. Every normalization ceremony on a White House lawn. Every AI-rendered tower rising over cleared land. The only thing that happened quickly was the fire.
She asked her president to see her.
The workers who built the towers, did anyone ask about them?
Notes & Sources
Event / Strikes
JINSA. (2026, March 1). Operations Epic Fury and Roaring Lion update. Jewish Institute for National Security of America. https://jinsa.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/Operations-Epic-Fury-and-Roaring-Lion-03-01-26.pdf
Times of Israel. (2026, March 1). Fiery explosions rock Gulf as Iran attacks Arab neighbors over US-Israeli strikes. https://www.timesofisrael.com/fiery-explosions-rock-gulf-as-iran-attacks-arab-neighbors-over-us-israeli-strikes/
Euronews. (2026, March 1). Iranian strikes hit Dubai and Abu Dhabi, damaging airport terminals and the Burj al-Arab. https://www.euronews.com/2026/03/01/iranian-strikes-hit-dubai-and-abu-dhabi-damaging-airport-terminals-and-the-burj-al-arab
Wikipedia contributors. (2026). 2026 Iranian strikes on the United Arab Emirates. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2026_Iranian_strikes_on_the_United_Arab_Emirates
International Business Times. (2026, March). American “tax-paying citizen” begs Trump for help after being trapped in Dubai amid rising tensions. https://www.ibtimes.com/american-tax-paying-citizen-begs-trump-help-after-being-trapped-dubai-amid-rising-tensions-3798414
Government Response
NOTUS. (2026, March). Americans stranded in Middle East find little help from State Department amid Iran war. https://www.notus.org/foreign-policy/americans-stranded-middle-east-help-state-department-iran-war
CNN. (2026, March 3). Americans stranded in Middle East. https://www.cnn.com/2026/03/03/politics/americans-stranded-middle-east
ABC News. (2026, March). State Department scrambles as Americans stranded in Middle East during war. https://abcnews.com/Politics/state-department-scrambles-americans-stranded-middle-east-war/story?id=130728917
NBC News. (2026, March). Trump administration firing thousands as Americans are stranded in war zone. https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/national-security/trump-administration-fire-thousands-americans-are-stranded-war-zone-rcna261682
MSNBC Maddow Blog. (2026, March). Pressed on Americans stranded abroad, Trump’s answer falls far short. https://www.ms.now/rachel-maddow-show/maddowblog/pressed-on-americans-stranded-abroad-trumps-answer-falls-far-short
Workers at Camps
Tribune India. (2026, March). Amid explosions, Punjabi workers at Abu Dhabi, Dubai camps feel the heat. https://www.tribuneindia.com/news/jalandhar/amid-explosions-punjabi-workers-at-abu-dhabi-dubai-camps-feel-the-heat/
Labor Conditions
Freedom United. (2021). Dubai’s Expo worker abuses. Reported from Equidem Research. https://www.freedomunited.org/news/dubais-expo-worker-abuses/
Human Rights Watch. (2023, November 21). UAE: Migrant worker abuses linked to broader climate harms. https://www.hrw.org/news/2023/11/21/uae-migrant-worker-abuses-linked-broader-climate-harms
MEED. (2013). Labour: It’s no easy life as a migrant worker. https://www.meed.com/labour-its-no-easy-life-as-a-migrant-worker/
Migrant Rights. (2010, June). Interview with a photojournalist who helped reveal the conditions of migrants in the UAE. https://www.migrant-rights.org/2010/06/interview-with-a-photojournalist-who-helped-reveal-the-conditions-of-migrants-in-the-uae/
Historical Arrangement
National Security Archive. (2020). Nixon and the oil weapon: The Jeddah agreement, 1974. George Washington University.
https://nsarchive.gwu.edu
U.S. Department of State. (2020). The Abraham Accords. https://www.state.gov/the-abraham-accords/
Defense Security Cooperation Agency. (2020). UAE major arms sales. https://www.dsca.mil/press-media/major-arms-sales
Mockery
(2026, March). [Post]. Threads. https://www.threads.com/@thevictorialoeffler/post/DVYlk6LCIKD
Wealth Data
Knight Frank. (2024). The Wealth Report 2024. https://content.knightfrank.com/resources/knightfrank.com/wealthreport/the-wealth-report-2024.pdf
World Inequality Lab. (2024). United Arab Emirates — World Inequality Database. https://wid.world/country/united-arab-emirates/
Books
Ali, S. (2010). Dubai: Gilded Cage. Yale University Press.
McFarland, V. (2020). Oil Powers: A History of the U.S.-Saudi Alliance. Columbia University Press.
Your excellent writing highlights yet another aspect of how shamefully the rich and powerful treat those who are essential but invisible to them in both peacetime and war.
This is insane!!! Thanks for sharing